The Forgotten French of the Midwest

 The time is 1823. The place is Fort Wayne. Indiana has been a state for seven years. The dismayed writer is William H. Keating, who has just arrived from the east:

Not being previously aware of the diversity in the character of the inhabitants, the sudden change from an American to a French population, has a surprising, and to say the last, an unpleasant effect; for the first twenty-four hours, the traveller fancies himself in a real Babel. . . . The business of a town of this kind differs so materially from that carried on in our cities, that it is almost impossible to fancy ourselves still within the same territorial limits.

This quote leads off Yale historian Jay Gitlin's book The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders and American Expansion. Whether he liked it or not, Keating knew what we have systematically forgotten.

Not only was French spoken frequently "in an enormous region stretching from Detroit to St. Louis to New Orleans," as Gitlin explains, the story of this Francophone Midwest "has never found a place in American history textbooks for three related reasons: the dramatis personae have never been correctly identified; the geographical setting of the story lies upon a north-south axis and therefore lies counter to the traditional east-west presentation of U.S. history; and the story has been dismissed as being irrelevant to the general themes of American history." {2}

Gitlin is out to fix this. His story centers on the powerful and prosperous Chouteau family (sometimes called a dynasty) of St. Louis and westward, who do not fit the cheerful-lazy-voyageur stereotype propagated by early US historians. These French came from many places, not just Canada; they were cosmopolitan; and they were deeply involved in commerce and trade. This was an urban frontier before it was a farmers' frontier. From the start it was "urban, cosmopolitan, connected, and diverse." {188} Gitlin concludes that the French have remained invisible, not because they were uninvolved in nation-building, but "in part because their story demands that we accept a frontier past that transcends our old dichotomies of heroes and villains, settlers and Indians." {190}

This book will change your idea of the Midwest, and its smooth readable style will leave you wanting more.

H-Net also has an interesting review of a related book, Claiborne A. Skinner's The Upper Country: French Enterprise in the Colonial Great Lakes.



Jay Gitlin, The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders & American Expansion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

Claiborne A. Skinner, The Upper Country: French Enterprise in the Colonial Great Lakes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).


Harold Henderson, "The Forgotten French of the Midwest," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 3 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

ProQuest Historical Newspapers(TM) in Academic Libraries

Genealogy is local, but we're not. Often we need access to newspapers in distant places. Some digitized titles are available by subscription. Some subscriptions are not available or affordable to individuals. ProQuest is one such, and in my experience libraries tend to subscribe to it just for their own localities if at all.

Here's where academic libraries can help the determined researcher, even if he or she is not formally affiliated there. Those libraries that allow the public (most, in my experience) have not only scholarly article databases like JStor, they may also subscribe to an interesting variety of ProQuest Historical Newspapers (TM), which has impressive runs of 38 titles. Those of particular Midwestern import in the ProQuest fold are the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Defender, Cleveland Call and Post, Detroit Free Press, Indianapolis Star, Louisville Courier Journal, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Public computers at one Midwestern university library recently had about half of the 38 titles listed at the above link. These were not for printing out or emailing, however, so be prepared to take notes the old-fashioned way. In actual use the titles are not consistent, so a continuous run of an Atlanta paper, for instance, actually involves several titles, not all of them alphabetized under "A."


UPDATE POSTED MONDAY MORNING: Over on the Transitional Genealogists Forum, Michele Lewis just posted word of a useful low-budget resource for those seeking on-line newspapers, on Wikipedia. And of course, being Wikipedia, it's a resource we can all contribute to.

Harold Henderson, "ProQuest Historical Newspapers(TM) in Academic Libraries," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 6 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

History books of potential interest to genealogists

Three books that looked promising to me, out of the huddled masses reviewed in The American Historical Review 117, no. 2 (April 2012): 533, 543, 525

An Illinois woman's struggle in the 1860s and later to give allegedly insane people the right to a jury trial before being immured in an asylum:
Linda V. Carlisle, Elizabeth Packard: A Noble Fight (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010).

How non-snooty restaurants rose along with the middle class:
Andrew P. Haley, Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class, 1880-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

A family story about crossing racial boundaries in St. Louis and New Orleans (although without as much historical context as one reviewer wanted):
Julie Winch, The Clamorgans: One Family's History of Race in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011).


Harold Henderson, “History books of potential interest to genealogists” Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 3 May 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post.]

St. Louis Court Records from 1787 to 1875 on line -- well, some of them

The Scout Report highlights an interesting online resource for Midwestern researchers whose people of interest may have stopped and stayed awhile at the gateway to the west (and the metropolis of southern Illinois), St. Louis. It's the St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Records Project from Washington University. Cases include civil, criminal and chancery (equity) actions and are searchable by plaintiff, defendant, year, action, and case notes. Some documents are as old as 1787 and some as recent as 1875, but most are from 1804 to 1835.

This is not primarily intended as a genealogical resource, since it is not an every-name index, and since from using the search engine it would appear that the cases available are limited to those categorized as having to do with four predefined categories: Lewis & Clark, freedom suits (involving slaves or those threatened with enslavement), the fur trade, and Native Americans.

Bookends Friday: Frontier cities

Fifty years ago historian Richard Wade published The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities 1790-1830, in which he argued that "The towns were the spearheads of the frontier" in the 19th century US, not the isolated coonskin-capped frontiersmen. Specifically he wrote about how Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville, Lexington, and St. Louis were key to the settlement of the Ohio River valley and farther west. This month the Indiana Magazine of History commemorates the book with five essays from later generations of historians about Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, and Indianapolis -- commending, critiquing, and extending Wade's thesis. "Rarely," writes David S. Stradling, "does a single book so quickly and thoroughly change the way historians think."

Ahem. I like to think of myself as a history buff (it's what I should have majored in) and an advocate for genealogists to be more historically aware. I think I had heard of Wade's, er, trailblazing book before, but I have never read it. And, frankly, when I'm not paying attention, I find it hard to remember that those five cities were laid out before their hinterlands were settled. We all have a lot of dubious history to unlearn. I'm adding this fifty-year-old book to my list; its high time for it to "quickly and thoroughly change" the way genealogists think too.

St. Louis index at the Missouri History Museum

Strictly speaking, St. Louis is out of my area, but our ancestors didn't know that. Hat tip to Diane Haddad, whose Genealogy Insider blog for Family Tree Magazine calls attention to the Missouri History Museum's Genealogy and Local History Index. The index is on line, the things indexed -- mostly pertaining to St. Louis residents and businesses -- are not, but you can request photocopies. I found a reference to a potential Gedney cousin who appeared in a scrapbook on "Missourians in the European War" (that is, World War I), an eleven-volume set, the kind of thing that often doesn't get indexed.

Dred Scott's descendants

Genealogy and history work together to recover the full story of Dred Scott, the subject of the notorious 1857 US Supreme Court decision, who died in St. Louis and who has numerous living descendants. Read the article in the new issue of the online journal Common-Place.

April in St. Louis

The St. Louis Genealogical Society's April 12 conference (PDF) -- billed as "the largest such single-day event in the Midwest" -- has nine speakers in 15 sessions. If I could make it, I'd want to attend

Paula Stuart-Warren, CG, on ancestral places of origin and old settlers' organizations

Ann Carter Fleming, CG, CGL, on St. Louis research (she co-authored Research in Missouri)

Tom Pearson on Illinois internet research

Scott Holl on resources for German genealogy at the St. Louis County Library

These regional-level conferences are more affordable and accessible than the nationals, and if going there is too much, you can pre-order audio CDs of specific presentations now.